Next presentations August 24, 2011

The first is at the UKOUG Management and Infrastructure SIG on Tuesday 20th September. I chair this SIG and it is all about how to manage Oracle when you have lots of databases, very big databases or a particular need to know a bit more about the rest of the IT Infrastructure. You can find the schedule here. The aim is to talk at a technical level but not the deep-dive of some of the RDBMS or HA presentations as we want to cover a wider brief.

As I say, one thing we do is look at the hardware your Oracle databases and application servers need to run on. This meeting we have Steve Shaw from Intel talking about getting the most out of your Xeon-based servers, but the general concepts apply to other platforms. If you are old enough, you will remember how you used to set up “HIMEM.SYS”, “EMM386.SYS and try to keep as much of the first 640K of your memory free. You might even have got down and dirty with you BIOS settings. We did it as the performance boosts were significant. Well, we don’t do that sort of thing anymore and Steve’s talk will probably make you want to! It still is a free way to get more out of your hardware.

Piet de Visser is also coming along and I always really enjoy his presentations. This time he is covering something of interest/concern to many of us – Outsourcing. I think that will be a pretty lively session.

I’m presenting as well, with Neil Chandler on the topic of how deep you should dive when solving technical issues. To 10046 trace or not.

We meet in Oracle’s city office, so handy for anyone in or around London or for anyone coming in from North of London (the office is 5 minutes walk from Liverpool Street Station and three stops along the underground from King’s Cross St Pancras). We’ve still got to finalise one or two agenda slots but they will be real-world talks about Enterprise Manager/GRID control. One fixed item on the agenda is that those who wish to retire to a pub afterwards to continue the discussions.

You may have noticed the little logo for the UKOUG TEBS conference appearing at the right of this blog. The agenda is not quite public yet so I cannot say too much, but I will be presenting at the event, on Index Organized Tables. I’ll be showing demonstrations of some of the things I have been blogging about and expanding on areas, joining it all up into one session. I might also be presenting on database design but that talk is being discussed and finalised at present. The UKOUG team have a lot of things that they have to pull together and organise just for the presentations, never mind the rest of the conferences such as the exhibition hall, catering, registration etc. I’ve been involved in helping with the agenda organisation this year, in a minor way, so I’ve seen it all from the inside.

The TEBS conference is, for me, the meeting highlight of the year. I’ve been to Oracle Open World and, interesting though it is and with some fabulous presentations and events, it is just too big, corporate and company line for me. Oh, I’d go again when the opportunity arises, but for me the UKOUG TEBS conference has a much better feel to it, you still get a load of great talks from Oracle about the latest/greatest, but you also get loads and loads of talks by many of the best in the field and the talks are independent – no pressure to be upbeat about Oracle or avoid any negative messages. In fact, if you honestly feel something in Oracle is worth avoiding, you are free to present and say “Don’t Do This!” 🙂

I had planned to go to more of the European conferences this year but it did not get myself organised. For me, as an Independent consultant, I need to present to justify the trip and I keep failing to get the submissions in on time.

Related

Why do you still need to graps a 10046 when you can use V$SQL_PLAN_STATISTICS_ALL.

Did I heard that STATISTICS_LEVEL is set to TYPICAL on production?

Who cares: grab a copy of you query, set ‘ALTER SESSION SET STATISTICS_LEVEL=ALL, run the query and then ‘select * from table(dbms_xplan.display_cursor(null, null,’RUNSTATS_LAST PARTITION COST BYTES’ ))’ and you get the most important info: the E-rows (what Oracle thinks) and the A-rows (what realy there is).